Tutored (4 page)

“Well, maybe I’m a very ignorant person,” he said.

“And proud to be so. Besides contaminating the lungs of a premature infant, your own cognitive ability was compromised. What if an emergency happened and you had to react quickly? And where was her mother during all this?”

“I already told you. She was at work at the late-night window.”

“What’s her name, Hakiam?”

“Why do you got to know everyone’s name? What difference does it make?”

“Don’t brush this off. You have to be very careful when a baby is in your care.”

“You know this ain’t my kid, right? You’re getting all worked up over nothing.”

“Nothing?
Nothing?
You don’t even know what nothing is. You said she was born early—how early?”

“I don’t know. Couple weeks. A few months. I forget.”

Wendy shook her head. “There’s a big difference between weeks and months. The normal gestation period—”

“What is this, sex ed?”

“I’m just making you aware that in an infant the lungs are the last organs to develop—”

Hakiam spoke over her. “She ain’t no more fragile than anyone else.”

“Are you just trying to argue with me or are you totally insane?”

“I ain’t come here for this shit. I’m here to be tutored in English and math and all I get is static from you. I’m trying to finish this thing and you have to be a bitch about everything and stand in my way.”

Wendy packed up her belongings, rose from her seat, and slung her bag over her shoulder. She looked him right in the eye and told him, “Drop dead.”

She was almost to the foot of the stairs when he recovered from her remark. He asked, “Hey, where are you going? Your sign says you’re here until five p.m.”

Wendy spun around, pointed her index finger at him, and said, “You better pray that nothing happens to that little baby, because if it does, I will make sure you get life in prison.”

She turned around again and escaped from his sight.

He called after her, “Make up your mind, which one do you want? Do you want me to get life or drop dead?”

A
t six that evening, Hakiam’s eyelids felt raw again. He reached his cousin’s place about that time. It was Leesa’s evening off from her job, so he hoped to get a full night’s rest and let Leesa do diaper duty.

He came across her asleep, curled up like the baby by her side on the mattress. He frowned. Leesa had told him to always put Malikia in the crib. It had something to do with the fact that an adult’s body could easily roll over and crush an infant. That was the lecture Leesa had given him, but, like most people he’d met, she had a different set of rules for herself.

His eyes swept to Malikia. She had her tiny hands balled up into tight fists, like she could handle herself.

He went into the other room and rooted through the fridge, only to be disappointed. It was a near-empty cavern containing just a few bottles of soda and half a stick of butter. No juice, no dairy products, no meat thawing,
and no fruit. No eggs to fry up. Not even a slice of bread to toast. He slammed the refrigerator door and damned those voucher people.

What a household
, he thought. Of all the places he’d been bounced to throughout his life, this took the cake (if only there were a cake to take).

Now he was wishing Leesa could have gotten the free-food voucher from social services. If she’d had the right ID, he could have made a meal of something. He couldn’t wait till she rescheduled; he wanted something now.

Then he saw that on the kitchen table under her bag, there was a Styrofoam box with
B & FF
written on it in red marker. He opened it to find a hamburger, half eaten, and some french fries sopping with grease and ketchup. He pulled up a seat and chowed down on what was left of the meal, picking up on biting where Leesa had left off.

“Hakiam, what are you doing eating up my food?” Leesa said to him as she entered the room with Malikia stationed on her hip.

Luckily, Hakiam had eaten fast and was on his last bite. “I got to eat something, don’t I?” he asked. “You ain’t got nothing in the fridge. Nothing at all. What if Malikia needed some milk?”

“Babies can’t drink cow’s milk, doofus,” Leesa told him.

“So she can’t have no variety? She supposed to drink that same powdered shit day after day?”

“Babies drink formula or breast milk. That’s it,” Leesa said, and turned to Malikia, frowning. “I can’t tell you how much money she could save me if she’d just take it from the tap.”

“Don’t nobody want to hear about your booby-milk sob story, Leesa,” Hakiam said.

Leesa grabbed the box that he was eating from. “You didn’t leave me one freaking french fry! And I’ll talk about my boobies if I want to.” She gave him a nudge on the side of his head. “Now what am I going to do for dinner?”

“Get your hand out of my face, Leesa. I’m sure that place you got that burger from is still open.”

“Oh, so it’s up to me to buy some more food.”

“Yeah, you. If the check from social services don’t come on time, you got to have another plan. You can’t just stand around here starving. You better—”

“Hold up,” she told him. “I know you ain’t trying to holler to me about all what I should do in my apartment.”

“You mean the HUDs, don’t you?”

She walked the empty box over to the trash can. “You got all the mouth in the world. It ain’t your place to say nothing about nothing.”

He waved her away. “It ain’t too much to ask that you have something here to eat.”

“You want something so bad, then why don’t you walk your happy ass down to the store and get it and quit giving me a shitload of drama about it? Shit, Hakiam, you’re supposed to be helping me out.”

“I am, ain’t I?”

“Big help you are sitting around here eating what you know was my food.”

“You promised me that I could have room and board.”

“I said room.”

“You said board, too.”

“I know what I said, Hakiam.”

“Well, I ain’t even got room. I got couch. You got the only room.”

“Listen, I don’t got to put up with this from you. My mom offered to take Malikia in—”

“Well, maybe you ought to let her do it.”

“Maybe you ought to shut your mouth and be grateful you got a roof over your head.”

About this time Malikia started wailing. Leesa checked her T-shirt to see a big wet stain on it.

“Goddamnit,” she said. “She got me again. That’s the second time today.”

All Hakiam wanted was a life with no sharp hard places. He wished he could get his own apartment. Someplace by himself. A two-bedroom: one to sleep in and one for entertainment. You know, shoot pool, lift weights, just chill. Then he thought,
Why stop there?
If he was going to dream, he was going to dream big. How about having a big mansion all to himself, with aluminum siding and big picture windows with pressed drapes and a long driveway surrounded by bushes trimmed into perfect rectangles? That was a much better vision than fiddling around some dinky, falling-apart hood apartment waiting on some government cheese.

He left Cincinnati for this? He could have saved himself the seventy-five-dollar bus fare and the bumpy ride he’d never forget.

Only a couple of weeks into this arrangement and it already stank like rotting flesh. It was like being in a marriage. A bad one where all he argued about was money (and the lack thereof). They would go round and round about the emptines of the icebox, and cable TV (she claimed she “needed” it; he thought it was a waste and would rather have Internet access), and the electricchargecardbill, and the heattelephonebill, and on and on. And where did she get off nudging the side of his head? No, it didn’t hurt, but it was the way she did it. No respect. Not a damn bit of respect. Let him put his hands on her just once and he bet she’d turn it into a federal case. The paltriness of his life ran through his mind, keeping him from sleep.

After another hour, he started hearing a driving beat and laughter and loud talk. He got up and walked into the front room. He nodded. No wonder Leesa had said it was okay for him to sleep in her room. There was a noisy, crowded party that seemed like it had first been confined to the kitchenette but had now spilled out into the hallway.

He made his way over to his cousin, who was in the kitchen, and asked her how come she hadn’t told him about this.

“I hope you ain’t think I got to run everything by you. This is my place, remember—my place,” she yelled, almost losing her balance.

Hakiam rolled his eyes. Leesa was so drunk, she was practically in a state of collapse.

“Hey, how’s Philly treating you?” some guy asked.

Someone else offered him a taste. Hakiam had nothing against alcohol, so he took a swallow or two.

Hakiam thought he better stay up just to keep an eye on Leesa. Especially since the party was at a weird stage, the part when the club atmosphere expanded to a bursting point and more and more people started coming in. The music kept on going. That beat had a life of its own. Plenty of faces, but each face felt like one he’d seen many times. How could that be? He’d only been there for a few weeks.

And then he saw her.
Her
. She looked like she’d just walked off the cover of one of those booty books. She had a pair of ripe butt cheeks that stared at him from her red hot pants, and when she turned back around he saw more of her anatomy. Nice tight waist, gorgeous high-shelved breasts. Big smile. A little too toothy and spacey, but hey, when you have a body like that who needs a good face?

Was it he who glided over to her or vice versa? It all happened so fast. He found out her name was Yasmine and that she lived just a few blocks away, on Fifty-first and Claire Street.

Hakiam was all ready to throw in. He was about to get into deep conversation with this fine thing. Since he’d been in this City of Brotherly Love, he hadn’t gone out with one honey. He was well overdue for some affection. Could she be the one? Could that emptiness all end right here and now?

He reached out to pull a strand of her weave from her eyes, and she kind of tossed her head back and did a laugh as he told her his name and that he liked her outfit, what little there was of it.

But then, out of the corner of his eye he saw this dude roll up on them. He was cut, like he spent a lot of time in a gym (the kind that required a membership or the kind that they have in the penitentiary). He had a certain masculine candor of “if you keep messing with my girl you’re going to find yourself getting up off the floor.”

Hakiam hated when guys got like that, all stingy. He’d seen this a thousand times. She presents herself as a free agent, but in reality, she’s locked into a contract that can’t be broken.

That dude gave him a second heavy look, and Hakiam wasn’t going to wait for a third.

That was when he decided to call it a night. It had to be a record for the shortest time he’d ever spent at a party.

He went into the back room and collapsed on his cousin’s bed next to Malikia. She was no fool; this baby had her little hands drawn up to her ears now to shield them from the sounds.

That made him chuckle a bit, that the infant wasn’t a fan of hip-hop—maybe she’d be into jazz. One thing was for sure, at least: she could sleep. Hakiam went back to spending his would-be rest doing the proverbial tossing and turning as night melted back into day.

W
as there anything worse than being seen out in public with your parent? And at a mall, no less. A mall that was heavily trafficked by kids from your school. Wendy’s father was there with Wendy in tow to buy winter curtains for the front room, which meant that they were deep in the department-store wing. At least none of her peers hung out there. Still, Wendy had to endure her father’s analysis paralysis as he looked at each swatch and fragment, comparing not size, not color, not texture, but cost.

Wendy eyed a pin-striped set and pointed it out to her father. “Eighty-one dollars. Forget it!” he exclaimed.

The woman at the counter wore a strained smile. She blew air into her bangs as she looked over at him. Wendy wondered if the woman had any other customers that threw such a conniption so easily.

He asked the saleswoman, “Why is this pattern four dollars more?”

The woman tried to explain. Wendy and her father had been there for the past forty minutes; people had bought new cars in less time.

They say you should let your emotions out little by little, so that you don’t explode all of a sudden. Wendy attempted to keep that in mind as her father asked, “Couldn’t you knock off twenty percent?”

“I’m sorry, sir, the price is as marked,” the woman said.

“How about fifteen?”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

Wendy bit off a hangnail as her dad, ever the persistent one, continued, “How about ten? A ten percent discount. You offer that when people open a line of credit here, don’t you?”

“Do you want to open a line of credit?” the woman asked.

“No, I would just like to have the ten percent.”

“For God’s sake, Dad,” Wendy said. “How many different ways are you going to ask for the same thing? She can’t give you a discount; the price is as marked. Why are you so cheap?”

“Because he’s a man,” the saleswoman answered.

After they left the store, her father commented, “That was very unprofessional, making a statement like that.”

“Let it go, Dad.”

“I’m never going back in that store again.”

“Sure, Dad.”

“There are two other department stores in this mall.”

“So you plan to haggle them to death instead?”

“Young lady, I do not have to put up with rude service and high prices. That store must think I’ve never seen a curtain before.”

“I wish I hadn’t,” Wendy said. She noticed a few people her age passing by on the other side of the aisle. Upon a closer look, she realized they weren’t her classmates and breathed a sigh of relief.

She and her father ended up in the rotunda.

There was a sign posted that said
JONATHAN DANIELS SINGS EVERY THURSDAY
. It sounded like a threat. But sure enough, an acoustic guitarist was set up there, singing his own cryptic lyrics with a small crowd gathered around him. He sang in a pseudo-sincere, sandy voice. There was also a table full of CDs for passersby to purchase if they liked what they heard.